Garrett Morgan

Garrett Augustus Morgan was born on March 4, 1877, in Paris, Kentucky. His father, Sydney Morgan, was the son of a Confederate colonel and an enslaved woman — a lineage that placed Garrett at the intersection of America's most violent contradictions from the moment of his birth. His mother, Eliza Reed, was also the child of formerly enslaved people. Garrett received only an elementary school education before leaving home at age 14 to seek work in Ohio. He arrived in Cincinnati with essentially nothing and found work as a handyman, teaching himself mechanics by taking things apart. He moved to Cleveland, where he got a job as a sewing machine repairman, and proved to be exceptionally good at understanding how mechanical systems worked. In 1907, he opened his own sewing machine repair shop. By 1909 he had added a garment manufacturing operation. By 1920, he had accumulated enough wealth to found the Cleveland Call, which grew into one of the most significant Black newspapers in the country.

His inventive work began from direct observation of danger. In 1912, he patented a device he called the Safety Hood and Smoke Protector — what we now recognize as a primitive but functional gas mask. The device worked by using a wet sponge filter at the breathing end of a hood, allowing the wearer to breathe air from close to the ground while the head was protected from smoke and toxic fumes above. It won a gold medal at the International Exposition of Sanitation and Safety and another gold medal from the International Association of Fire Chiefs. But the invention's real-world test came four years later. On July 25, 1916, a natural gas explosion trapped more than 30 workers inside a tunnel being drilled beneath Lake Erie near Cleveland. Rescue crews were unable to enter because of the toxic gases. Morgan arrived with his brother, put on his Safety Hoods, and descended into the tunnel. They rescued multiple survivors. It made national news.

However, when it became known that Morgan was Black, orders for his gas mask — which had been pouring in from fire departments and mining companies across the country — largely dried up. He responded by doing what many Black inventors of the era were forced to do: hiring white actors to front his demonstrations at trade shows, so that buyers would not know the inventor was a Black man. It was a humiliating compromise, but it kept his business alive. In World War I, an improved version of his Safety Hood was adopted by the U.S. Army and used by soldiers in the trenches. His design is a direct ancestor of the gas masks still worn by military personnel and first responders today.

His most well-known invention came in 1923. After witnessing a serious collision between an automobile and a horse-drawn carriage at a Cleveland intersection, Morgan recognized a fatal gap in the existing traffic signal technology: signals switched directly from Stop to Go with no warning interval, giving drivers no time to clear the intersection safely. He invented a three-position traffic signal with a third position — an all-directional stop — that halted traffic in every direction before new traffic entered the intersection. It was the direct predecessor of the yellow warning light that exists on every traffic signal in the world today. He sold the patent rights to General Electric for $40,000 (roughly $700,000 in today's money), a significant sum but far less than the invention was ultimately worth as it became a global standard. His traffic signal patent was one of the first awarded to a Black inventor by the U.S. Patent Office for a traffic safety device.

Morgan lived to see his inventions become infrastructure. He died on July 27, 1963, in Cleveland at age 86, just weeks after the March on Washington was announced. He had spent more than half a century building things that made the world safer — most of the world not knowing who had built them.